Summary

Margaret Thatcher's premiership changed the face of modern Britain. Yet few people know of the critical role played by Jews in sparking and sustaining her revolution. Was this chance, choice, or simply a reflection of the fact that, as the Iron Lady herself said: ‘I just wanted a Cabinet of clever, energetic people and frequently that turned out to be the same thing’?

In this book, the first to explore Mrs Thatcher’s relationship with Britain’s Jewish community, Robert Philpot shows that her regard did not come simply from representing a constituency with more Jewish voters than any other, but stretched back to her childhood. She saw her own philosophical beliefs expressed in the values of Judaism – and in it, too, she saw elements of her beloved father’s Methodist teachings.

Margaret Thatcher: The Honorary Jew explores Mrs Thatcher’s complex and fascinating relationship with the Jewish community and draws on archives and a wide range of memoirs and exclusive interviews, ranging from former Cabinet ministers to political opponents. It reveals how Immanuel Jakobovits, the Chief Rabbi, assisted her fight with the Church of England and how her attachment to Israel led her to internal battles as a member of Edward Heath’s government and as Prime Minister, as well as examining her relationships with various Israeli leaders.

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Margaret Thatcher - Robert Philpot

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PROLOGUE

VIENNA, JANUARY 1939

On 21 January 1939 Edith Mühlbauer received the letter from a Grantham grocer which would save her life.

Less than a year previously, the seventeen-year-old might have considered the notion that she would need rescuing by her English penfriend’s father faintly ridiculous. The Mühlbauer family lived a comfortable existence on Schubertsgasse in Vienna’s Alsergrund district. The area was home to the city’s many medical institutions and to those Jewish professionals – doctors, lawyers, businessmen, bankers like Edith’s father – who had escaped the poverty, immigrants, prostitutes and unassimilated orthodox Hasidic Jews of the old walled Leopoldstadt ghetto across the Danube. As the historian Marsha Rozenblit suggested, Vienna’s ninth district was very much ‘the proper address for a new breed of urban Jew’.¹

It was an area rich with historical and Jewish association. Franz Schubert’s birthplace was on a neighbouring street to Schubertsgasse. To the south stood the baroque Palais Lichtenstein with its art museum; the austere silver-grey Josephinum Palace founded by Emperor Joseph II to train the imperial army’s doctors and surgeons; and the city’s huge general hospital with the ‘praying pavilion’ synagogue for Jewish patients in its grounds. To the east, the disused Friedhof Rossau Jewish cemetery which dated back to 1540, bordered by the Jewish hospital and old people’s home. Before he fled the city in June 1938, Sigmund Freud’s practice lay on Berggasse. Besides Schubert and Freud, the Alsergrund was at one time also home to Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; and Victor Adler, who founded the Social Democratic Party of Austria.

There seemed little that Edith needed, or wanted, to be rescued from. But when Alfred Roberts’s letter, with the permit which allowed her to apply for a visa to travel to England, arrived on that winter morning, Edith took out her typewriter and wrote: ‘I thank you very much for sending it. I will never in my whole live forgett [sic] it you.’ With a hint at the mixture of pain and relief that their daughter’s impending departure was causing them, Edith continued: ‘Even my parents were happy that it is possible now for me to go to England.’

Edith also wanted to offer a sign of her appreciation: ‘Please tell me what you and your dear family like for a present?’ She had an idea that probably caused the Roberts family momentary confusion. Edith asked if Roberts’s daughters, Muriel and Margaret, would like a ‘pocket’ – which, confusingly, is the word for handbag in German – and, if so, in what colour? And what would Roberts and his ‘dear wife’ like? ‘Tell it to me,’ she added neatly in her own hand at the end of the typed sentence. And then it was on to practicalities. ‘How far it is from London to Grantham?’ she asked. ‘Have I to take the train from London to Grantham or the ship?’²

But, as she thanked Roberts once again for his help, Edith knew that she had to escape soon. The plight of her fellow Jews worsened by the day. The terror had begun a year previously, within hours of the Wehrmacht crossing the border into Austria on 12 March. No shots had been fired; it had not been necessary – there had been no resistance. They called it the Blumenkreig – the war of flowers. Cheering crowds greeted the German troops with Hitler salutes. Buildings were draped with swastika flags. Women threw flowers at smiling soldiers.

Some 70,000 people – many of them Jews – had been rounded up and arrested within days of the Germans’ arrival. On 1 April, the first convoy set off for the Dachau concentration camp, across the former German border near Munich. Jewish-owned shops and businesses were seized or menacing Brownshirts were stationed outside to enforce a boycott. Naturally, Jews were among the 400,000 people barred from voting in the plebiscite in which 99.7 per cent of Austrians endorsed the Anschluss.

The American reporter, William Shirer, recorded the ‘unbelievable scenes’ he witnessed in Edith’s hometown:

The Viennese, usually so soft and sentimental, were behaving worse than the Germans, especially toward the Jews. Every time you went out, you saw gangs of Jewish men and women, with jeering storm troopers standing over them and taunting crowds shouting insults, on their hands and knees scrubbing Schuschnigg [the former Austrian chancellor] slogans off the sidewalks and curbs. I had never seen quite such humiliating scenes in Berlin or Nuremberg.³

Shortly afterwards, the Nuremberg Laws – stripping Jews of their citizenship and making them mere subjects of the Nazi state, and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Aryans – were applied to Austria. Jews were banished from most professions, the doors of schools and universities closed to them. By the summer, Jewish emigration had reached a monthly average of 8,600.

Worse was to come. On 9 November – Kristallnacht – plumes of smoke filled the night sky as all but one of Vienna’s forty-two synagogues were burned to the ground. In the streets mobs attacked and looted 4,000 Jewish-owned shops as the police stood to one side. Eight thousand Jews were arrested and 5,000 were sent, in the following days, to Dachau.⁴

At some point during this unfolding tragedy, Edith’s father realised he was powerless to protect his family. Edith wrote to her English penfriend, Muriel Roberts, asking whether she could come and stay. Muriel passed the letter to her father. Edith’s father then wrote directly to Alfred Roberts. The Roberts had never met Edith and they could not accept such an undertaking alone. ‘We had neither the time – having to run the shops – nor the money,’ Roberts’s younger daughter later recalled.⁵ So Roberts turned to his fellow local Rotarians, reading out the plea from Edith’s father at their next meeting. The Rotarians agreed that, together, they would support Edith. They would pay for her travel, provide her with a guinea a week in pocket money and each take the teenager in for a month or so.⁶

With the promise of sanctuary and safety in England now on the horizon, Edith waited. On 23 March 1939, she replied to a further letter from Roberts in which she had enclosed a photograph. She had attempted to get her visa at the British Passport Office but there were about 200 people there and only twenty received visas. Therefore she had to send her passport to the consulate for a visa. ‘Never mind,’ she wrote, ‘I’ll wait patient [sic], for there are here a great number of applications to be dealt with.’ Again, she expressed her gratitude to Roberts: ‘I am ever so glad that you helped me and that there are various other people which want to help me too, and take me into their nice homes. I really hope to be happy there.’⁷

‘The great spiritual and moral truths of Judaism’

Half a century after Alfred Roberts agreed to help Edith Mühlbauer escape the Nazis, his daughter delivered her most famous address on how her faith informed her politics. Nicknamed the Sermon on the Mound, Margaret Thatcher’s May 1988 speech to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland offered the then-Prime Minister the chance to defend her government’s policies in the face of vociferous criticism from many leading churchmen.

But while she claimed to speak ‘personally as a Christian as well as a politician’,⁸ the speech also hinted at the fact that, as the Sunday Telegraph had declared five months previously: ‘Judaism is the new creed of Thatcherite Britain.’⁹ The High Tory paper was not alone in its conclusion. From the other end of the political spectrum came a similar view: The Guardian’s Hugo Young pronounced the Prime Minister ‘in some senses an honorary Jew herself’.¹⁰ In her speech, Mrs Thatcher referred twice to Britain’s ‘Judaic-Christian tradition’, once to its ‘Judaic-Christian inheritance’ and pronounced: ‘The Christian religion – which, of course, embodies many of the great spiritual and moral truths of Judaism – is a fundamental part of our national heritage.’

Neither was this praise for ‘Judeo-Christian’ values an isolated one. As Eliza Filby suggested, Mrs Thatcher’s repeated use of this term – which entered popular parlance in the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War – underlined ‘her identification with the Jewish faith’.¹¹ Lady Thatcher confirmed this assertion: ‘I believe in what are often called Judeo-Christian values: indeed, my whole political philosophy is based on them.’ The former Prime Minister recognised the dangers of ‘falling into the trap of equating in some way the Jewish and Christian faiths’ – as a Christian, she did not ‘believe that the Old Testament – the history of the Law – can be fully understood without the New Testament – the history of Mercy’. However, she also expressed her belief that Christians should pay more heed to ‘the Jewish emphasis on self-help and acceptance of personal responsibility’, while their bishops could learn from the teachings of her favourite religious leader, Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits.¹²

These sentiments were not simply another example of what critics saw as Mrs Thatcher’s desire to drape her political project in the cloak of religious justification. Instead, the roots of her identification with Judaism – as with her political philosophy in general – are to be found in the Methodist upbringing and wider Protestant ethics imparted to her by her father, Alfred Roberts. For while Mrs Thatcher famously had little to say about her mother Beatrice, she frequently waxed lyrical about the impact of her father. ‘I just owe almost everything to my father,’ she declared on the steps of Downing Street after becoming Prime Minister in May 1979.¹³

Life in the Roberts household, in Lady Thatcher’s words, ‘revolved around Methodism’.¹⁴ But there was, believed Charles Dellheim, ‘a certain Hebraic tinge to the Methodist milieu’ of her upbringing which contributed to her values and political outlook.¹⁵ Alfred and Beatrice Roberts raised their daughters in a particular tradition of Methodism. It was those Methodist principles and her father’s understanding of them, which, later in her life, Mrs Thatcher saw reflected in Judaism.

Nonconformism has historically had strong links with Liberalism and the left. In the nineteenth century, William Gladstone suggested it had ‘formed the backbone of British Liberalism’.¹⁶ Liberalism, in turn, had been the principal vehicle by which Nonconformists sought to advance the cause of civic and religious liberty and reduce the powers of the Established Church. At the same time, the Liberal Party advanced principles, such as support for free trade, with which many Nonconformists naturally sympathised, a reflection of their hostility to state interference in religious matters.¹⁷ After its emergence, a strong bond also developed between the Labour Party and Nonconformism. Indeed, the party was often said to owe ‘more to Methodism than Marx’.

But these associations were largely ones with Primitive Methodism, the strand of Methodism which split from Wesleyan Methodism in the middle of the nineteenth century. Primitive Methodism aligned itself with political progressivism and was strong in Wales, Cornwall, the Staffordshire Potteries, Yorkshire and the Durham and Northumberland coalfields.¹⁸ Alfred Roberts and his family, however, were Wesleyan Methodists, who were altogether more conservative. In relation to other forms of Nonconformism, Wesleyan Methodism – which was usually associated with the middle classes and flourished in Lincolnshire, Bristol and parts of Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds – was, in the words of the Methodist leader Rupert Davies, ‘almost High Church’.¹⁹ The strong bonds between Liberalism and Methodism were far weaker among Wesleyans – John Wesley had been a Tory – and, wrote David Bebbington, ‘only among Wesleyans were Conservatives to be found in any numbers’.²⁰

The differing political dispositions of Primitive and Wesleyan Methodism were captured by a letter to the Methodist Recorder from one Reverend J. Ernest in 1922: ‘Nothing has characterised Wesleyan Methodism more than its determination not to support a particular party … can this really be claimed of Primitive Methodism?’²¹ It was a sentiment which must have appealed to Roberts, who, throughout his career in local politics, always stood as an independent. Moreover, the interwar drift of lower-middle class Nonconformists away from the Liberal Party to the Tories – Stanley Baldwin assiduously wooed such voters – was echoed in Alfred Roberts’s own political journey.²²

While the two Methodist strands were reunited in 1932, Grantham waited another twelve years before accepting the reunion, maintaining a separate Wesleyan church, Primitive Methodist chapel and Free Methodist chapel. That Roberts chose to take his family not to the nearby Primitive or Free Methodist chapels but to Finkin Street in central Grantham was no doubt both a political and social statement, as much as it was a theological one.

Roberts’s Methodism ran seamlessly through every aspect of his life. In his eyes, there were no distinctions between his time serving customers behind the mahogany counter in his shop on North Parade, preaching before the congregation in the pulpit beneath the giant organ in Finkin Street, or admonishing his over-spending fellow councillors across Grantham’s council chamber and lamenting the fact that ‘the people who don’t pay the rates are sponging on those who do’.²³

The homespun truths which Mrs Thatcher later used to deliver her political message – in which her father figured so frequently that, as Peter Hennessy suggested, it sometimes felt as if the country was ruled by him from beyond the grave – reflected this mixture of Roberts as lay preacher, grocer and civic leader.²⁴

The beliefs which Roberts preached and which underpinned his daughter’s worldview litter his sermon notes. ‘The Kingdom of God is within you,’ Margaret’s father suggested, reflecting his belief in the individual’s responsibility before God for their own actions.²⁵ Fifty years later in Downing Street, Mrs Thatcher recalled the impact of her parents’ beliefs: ‘All my upbringing was to instil into both my sister and I a fantastic sense of duty, a great sense of whatever you do you are personally responsible for it. You do not blame society. Society is not anyone.’²⁶

Individual responsibility and the work ethic were closely tied. ‘It is the responsibility of man ordained by the creator that he shall labour for the means of existence. It is a supreme act of faith,’ Roberts told his congregants.²⁷ Just after she had won her third consecutive election victory in 1987, his daughter bemoaned the ‘British guilt-complex’ which traduced success. She pondered its cause and found the answer in ‘a misplaced Nonconformist conscience – a misunderstanding of people like John Wesley’. No doubt with her father’s teachings in mind, Mrs Thatcher attempted to correct this false impression of Methodism’s founding father who, she was keen to point out, was ‘of course a High Tory’:

He inculcated the work ethic, and duty. You worked hard, you got on by the result of your own efforts: then, as you prospered, it was your duty to help others to prosper also. The essence of Methodism is in Matthew 24 – the Parable of the Talents. You have a duty to make what you can out of your talents, and to assist others. All that helped to build up a middle class in this country – a middle class with a conscience. That conscience built churches, hospitals, schools, abolished slavery, founded Dr Barnardo’s.²⁸

That self-advancement was a moral obligation was also evident in Alfred Roberts’s deep commitment to the value of education. It was a commitment seen not only in the manner in which he raised his daughter, but also in his somewhat more surprising, given its associations with trade unionism and the left, chairmanship of Grantham’s Workers’ Educational Association.

As Mrs Thatcher’s comments in 1987 indicate, individual responsibility did not negate the importance of the community, public service or private charity. Roberts’s belief in what his daughter later termed ‘duties to the church, duties to your neighbour’ was apparent in his household.²⁹ At Christmas, 150 parcels purchased by the Grantham Rotary Club and bound for poor families were made up in the shop. The beneficiaries of Beatrice’s twice-weekly bakes were not simply her own family, but the sick, elderly and unemployed. Mrs Thatcher would later describe her parents’ attitude: ‘We were always encouraged to think in terms of practical help and to think very little of people who thought that their duty to the less well-off started and finished by getting up and protesting in the market place.’³⁰

Methodism, of course, had a long tradition of such protesting: Wesley was involved in the anti-slavery movement and advocated prison reform, while his heirs fought against the privileges afforded to the Church of England, as well as for temperance and Sabbatarianism. By the 1930s, the Wesleyan Roberts may have fought to retain ‘our English Sunday’ and, like his wife, been a teetotaller, but the causes to which many Methodists now gravitated – pacifism and social reform – were not ones he shared. Involvement in ‘social issues’, he believed, risked turning the church into a ‘glorified discussion group’, a sentiment which would be echoed in his daughter’s assertion in her 1988 address that ‘Christianity is about spiritual redemption, not social reform.’³¹

Given his apparent aversion to protesting, it was unsurprising that Roberts had little sympathy for the unemployed Jarrow marchers as they passed through Grantham in 1936.³² His daughter did admire, however, ‘how neatly turned out’ the children of the town’s unemployed families were. ‘Their parents were determined to make sacrifices for them,’ she later wrote, before emphasising the link between individual responsibility, charity and community which her father imparted: ‘The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people … It meant that they never dropped out of the community and, because others quietly gave what they could, the community remained together.’³³ Her upbringing thus led Mrs Thatcher to believe in the moral superiority of private charity – where the individual gave voluntarily – over tax-financed welfare, where he or she did not.³⁴ That this may have felt paternalistic to the recipients, especially to those who felt as citizens that they had certain ‘rights’, was not a concept for which either father or daughter had much time.

While John Campbell described Roberts’s preaching as ‘fundamentalist [and] Bible-based’,³⁵ this appears to be a misreading of his beliefs. As Antonio Weiss argued, Roberts’s sermon notes indicate both a clear acceptance of evolutionary theory, a rejection of fundamentalism – ‘Orthodoxy, tradition and Fundamentalism may be a guide for some, but they must never become our chains’ – and, through his references to Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, William Wordsworth, Aristotle and Alexander Pope, an openness to non-religious influences.³⁶

There are suggestions of limits to Roberts’s ecumenism. Although he enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Catholic priest whose church stood opposite his shop, Roberts refused an offer to view the pictures inside. ‘No, no, no,’ he responded. ‘I’ll never put my foot inside a Catholic church.’ However, as Charles Moore argued, such attitudes were not unusual at the time.³⁷ But there is also evidence to suggest that Roberts was not a bigot. Indeed, his sermon notes urged the congregation to ‘avoid the presumptuous claim that any one way of any church has a special prerogative where the Holy Spirit of God is concerned’.³⁸

Mrs Thatcher herself felt that no ‘great theological divide had been crossed’ when, after marrying in Wesley’s Chapel in London, she began to worship with her husband at their local Anglican church. It helped, she later said, that the Farnborough parish church was low church, before adding slightly dismissively: ‘Anyway, John Wesley considered himself a member of the Church of England to his dying day.’³⁹ Political and social factors may also have been at play. Given her political ambitions, joining the ‘Tory Party at prayer’, as it was then called, was not an unhelpful step, while worshipping at an Anglican church – she was never confirmed into the Church of England – signalled the rather firmer foothold in the ranks of the middle classes with which Mrs Thatcher’s marriage had provided her. Perhaps unconsciously this little symbol of social mobility was her way of aping her father’s attendance at a Wesleyan rather than a Primitive Methodist chapel.

That ecumenism may also, as Weiss noted, have manifested itself in Mrs Thatcher’s later admiration for the Jews.⁴⁰ When ordaining her an ‘honorary Jew’, Young suggested that ‘her interest in Jews and the Jewish cause has not been lifelong. In Methodist Grantham and on the Rotary circuit in Kent, where she was grounded in Tory politics, the bias, one imagines, might have been rather the other way’. Instead, he argued, the bond was forged in her future parliamentary seat of Finchley, where ‘any novice politician becomes aware of the Jewish vote’. While twenty-five years of ‘courting … the synagogues’ of her constituency had no doubt provided her with ‘a long lesson in the Jewish virtues, which closely resemble her own’.⁴¹

It is true that for many in the small towns of England in the 1930s, the bias was, indeed, ‘the other way’. As Dellheim suggested, ‘a grocer’s daughter from a classic lower-middle class background … [would] more likely to have been an anti-Semite than a philo-Semite’. Margaret Roberts did not, however, fall prey to the prejudice that regarded Jews as ‘capitalist usurpers undermining the little man’.⁴²

Alfred Roberts certainly seems to have been free from such prejudices: apart from his efforts on behalf of Edith Mühlbauer, he subscribed to the Picture Post, with its liberal, anti-fascist bent, and encouraged his daughter to read books such as Insanity Fair, which recounted Nazi anti-Semitism. He appears as a man who was both aware of the perilous situation that Europe’s Jews faced and prepared to answer a call for help. When, nearly sixty years later, Edith Nökelby (as she had become) was traced to Sao Paulo in Brazil, Lady Thatcher responded: ‘What can one person do? That is the question that people so often ask. Never hesitate to do whatever you can, for you may save a life.’⁴³ These were words Alfred Roberts could easily have uttered.

Beyond this awareness of, and sympathy for, the victims of Nazi persecution, we see in Roberts’s Methodism the religious and ethical foundations upon which his daughter’s later relationship with the Jewish community would be built. The commitment to individual responsibility and self-reliance; the centrality of John Wesley’s work ethic; the importance of education; and the belief in a moral obligation to better oneself and to give back to the community through good works. Mrs Thatcher recognised this herself. Three weeks after moving into No. 10, she met the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, in Downing Street. She gushed about her admiration for Jews, offering a description which mixed religion with a paean to what she would later describe as the ‘Jewish way of life’:⁴⁴ ‘It has to do with my Methodist upbringing,’ she told Begin. ‘Methodism, you see, means method. It means sticking to your guns, dedication, determination, triumph over adversity, reverence for education – the very qualities you Jews have always cherished.’⁴⁵ There was nothing hollow in the simple claim of Lord Young, one of her Jewish Cabinet ministers: ‘She was a Judeophile.’⁴⁶

In Finchley, Mrs Thatcher heard the values her father had preached expressed on the doorsteps of her Jewish constituents, as well as expounded in its synagogues. She may well have been unaware of these associations at the time, but she surely recognised them as they were expressed back to her in the streets of north London two decades later. ‘In the thirty-three years I represented it [Finchley], I never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to one of my constituency surgeries. They had always been looked after by their own community,’ she wrote in her memoirs.⁴⁷

Alone, however, this might not have been sufficient to turn her respect and admiration for Jewish values into an identification which was so close that it would lead her supporters to pronounce Judaism ‘the new creed of Thatcherite Britain’. There were thus further bonds which went beyond the recognition of supposedly shared beliefs. As we shall see, Mrs Thatcher saw in her Jewish constituents’ efforts to attain a place in the ranks of the middle classes – many of them had roots and family in distinctly non-suburban Spitalfields, Stepney Green and Whitechapel – echoes of her father’s journey. And, of course, many years later, she would present herself as the champion of similarly upwardly mobile voters in the likes of Basildon, Welwyn Hatfield, Peterborough and Watford.

Still, though, there was something more. As Campbell wrote, Mrs Thatcher emerged onto the political stage in the early 1970s as the ‘archetypal Tory lady in a hat and pearls, quintessentially southern and suburban’.⁴⁸ By then, this had become a very real part of her political persona: the persona which made her acceptable to, and accepted by, local Tory associations. But it rather disguised another crucial element of her make-up: the Nonconformist grocer’s daughter from provincial England, the grammar school girl whose self-taught father had left school at thirteen.

The part of her that was acutely attuned to the snobberies and prejudices ingrained into the upper echelons of the Conservative Party and Britain’s ruling classes recognised Jews as kindred spirits. Thanks to both her background and her gender, she, too, regarded herself as an outsider. But for her there was no shame, indeed, there was nobility in her father’s trade as a shopkeeper. Having historically been excluded from so many occupations, few Jews would have considered joining in the sneering which sometimes accompanied references to ‘the grocer’s daughter’.

And when, through calculation and conviction, Mrs Thatcher began her assault on what she saw as the mushy, consensual and unprincipled form that the Conservative Party had taken in the post-war era, she found her staunchest allies among that distinct minority grouping: the Jewish Tory. Together, Sir Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman would help provide the intellectual underpinning for what became the ‘Thatcher revolution’.

The images which defined her election victories – encapsulated by their 1979 offering ‘Labour isn’t working’ – were crafted by two brothers born into a family of Baghdadi Jews, Charles and Maurice Saatchi. They had never worked on a political account, weren’t Conservatives and, suggested a colleague, feared they would be regarded by the Tories as ‘upstart Jewboys’.⁴⁹ In those elections, as she did with millions of their fellow countrymen, Mrs Thatcher crafted an appeal which stripped the Conservative Party of the whiff of elitism which, as Sherman later suggested, had made it ‘unsympathetic as a milieu, rather than as a political force’ to many British Jews.⁵⁰ With power attained, she appointed more Jews than any previous Prime Minister to her Cabinets. There were, as one of her predecessors, Harold Macmillan, contemptuously and sniffily remarked, ‘more Estonians in the Cabinet than Etonians’.⁵¹ Their presence in the highest ranks of government was all the more remarkable given that in the twenty-five years after the Second World War, there had only been two Jewish Conservative MPs.⁵² But in Sir Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, David Young, Leon Brittan, Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Howard, she found men who if not always sharing her views shared her impatience with the ‘grousemoor’ Conservatism of the party’s old guard.

There would later be what she no doubt deemed as snobbish carping from such patricians. Of particular irritation to the Prime Minister was the moral censure of her policies by the Church of England, most famously in its ‘Faith in the City’ report. To her rescue, however, came the Chief Rabbi who had little time for the supposed obligations government owed to the poor and offered a rather different prescription for the nation’s ills to that suggested by the bishops: ‘Building up self-respect by encouraging ambition and enterprise through a more demanding and satisfying work-ethic, which is designed to eliminate idleness and to nurture pride in eating the toil of one’s hands as the immediate targets.’⁵³ At times Jakobovits appeared to behave more like a traditional head of the Established Church. Rarely, suggested Hugo Young, did anything cross his lips which did not ‘chime harmoniously with some aspect or other of the new Conservatism’.⁵⁴

Not every Jew appreciated being the object of Margaret Thatcher’s admiration – many would oppose her vigorously and baulk at the blessings the Chief Rabbi appeared to bestow on her project – but many more did. This, then, is the story of a very special relationship.

42 Dellheim, p. 254. When Charles Moore’s authorised biography appeared, Lady Thatcher’s early private letters revealed a couple of instances of what he terms the ‘mild, unthinking anti-Semitism’ which was sadly prevalent at the time. She refers on one occasion to someone being ‘a smart woman but she looked a Jewess. She was dark with a fair complexion and the typical long nose.’ In another, she speaks of fellow guests on a foreign holiday. ‘Some are rather tatty tourists: Jews and novo [ sic ] riche.’ (Moore, Not For Turning , p. 59 and p. 116)

51 Cited in ‘Diary: Macsim’, The Times , 3 April 1986. It should be noted that Macmillan, along with Churchill, had opposed the 1939 White Paper setting limits to Jewish immigration to Palestine and, in the immediate post-war years leading up to the creation of Israel, they were in a minority in their party in backing Zionism. See Alastair Horne, Harold Macmillan 1894–1956 (London: Macmillan, 1988, pp. 308–9)

52 Filby, God and Mrs Thatcher , p. 249

53 Immanuel Jakobovits, ‘From Doom to Hope’: A Jewish View on ‘Faith In The City’, the Report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas (London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1986), p. 14

54 Young, One of Us , p. 423

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

By mid-April 1939, Edith Mühlbauer was finally on her way to Britain, the anxiety of whether she would see her parents and family again mixed with the relief of escaping the Nazis’ tightening grip on central Europe. There was little about Grantham that Edith found familiar. This provincial Middle England town was as far from Mitteleuropa as it was possible to imagine. Perhaps its reputation was best captured by a former town clerk: ‘A narrow town, built on a narrow street and inhabited by narrow people.’¹

Edith arrived at the Roberts’s home bearing the gifts she had written about: red handbags, one for Muriel, the other for her penfriend’s younger sister, Margaret. Seventeen-year-old Muriel was amiable and bright, had recently left school and was training to become a physiotherapist. It is not hard to see why she sometimes found Margaret, who was more academic and serious, irritating; constantly held up as a model pupil by her teachers at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where Muriel had also attended and where their father was a governor.² Four years younger than her sister, Margaret was hard-working, diligent and invariably well-behaved.

Edith remembered Margaret’s beautiful hair and thought her reserved.³ That latter impression may have been misplaced. While others recalled that Margaret was quiet in class, there was nothing timid about her. She enjoyed public speaking, entering competitions where she recited the poetry of Longfellow, Tennyson, Whitman and Kipling. At Kesteven’s debating club she invariably asked visiting speakers a question and, in debate, she exhibited greater self-confidence than many other pupils.⁴

Margaret was very much her father’s daughter. Roberts cut an imposing figure: a tall, handsome man in his late forties with blond, almost albino, curly hair and striking blue eyes. His daughters’ contemporaries would later recall him in a largely positive light: ‘dignified’, ‘delightful’, ‘whenever his name was mentioned it was mentioned with great reverence’.⁵ Despite his rather austere countenance – and surely the tale of Edith Mühlbauer confirms this – Roberts was also capable of acts of great personal kindness. In old age Edith recalled him as a ‘serious and lovely man’.⁶

Edith’s escape had been facilitated by Roberts’s membership of the Rotary. For Margaret, her father, the local councillor, Methodist lay preacher, president of the Chamber of Trade, a governor of the local boys’ and girls’ grammar schools and a director of the Grantham Building Society, was truly committed to the Rotary’s motto of ‘Service above Self’. Rotarians called for their members to put partisanship to one side, raise money for charities and good causes, and become both informed about and involved in local, national and international affairs.⁷

But the foundations of this civic engagement, and the source of many of the homilies Margaret would later share with the nation, were her father’s two shops. Within two years of marrying Beatrice Stephenson, a seamstress who lived at home with her ‘very, very Victorian, very, very strict’ mother,⁸ Roberts had managed to acquire his first store: a small grocery at No. 1 North Parade. Over the next six years, he opened another shop half a mile away and then bought out his neighbour’s newsagent in North Parade, thereby becoming a sub-postmaster.

Margaret’s later claims that Alfred was a ‘specialist grocer’ may have been something of an exaggeration,⁹ but it was a forgivable one. His daughter was justifiably proud of her self-made father who, hailing from a family of shoemakers, left school at thirteen and, by working and saving hard, had progressed from a series of odd jobs, including, as she joyfully related many years later at Prime Minister’s Questions, working in the tuck shop at Oundle School, before becoming a grocer’s apprentice and owner of two shops.¹⁰

For Margaret, her father was not simply a ‘specialist grocer’, he was also a ‘self-taught scholar’.¹¹ While allowing again for daughterly pride, this description does capture Roberts’s reverence for education. He had wanted to be a teacher but his vocation had been frustrated by the need for him to leave school in order to contribute to the family finances. He was, recalled Lady Thatcher, ‘determined to make up for this and to see that I took advantage of every educational opportunity’.¹² Roberts was thus not simply a vociferous reader himself